o.canada.com/2013/09/11/emma-thompson-and-pierce-brosnan-unabashedly-old-fashioned/Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan: Unabashedly old fashioned
Jay Stone
Published: September 11, 2013
Updated: 15 mins ago
Pierce Brosnan sits down on a backless love seat, folds one knee over the other, and practically topples over. Emma Thompson is in stitches.
“There was a fantastic piece that Peter Sellers did,” she says.
“That’s one of my favourite movies,” he says.
“Oh I love that,” she says. “Just grip that knee and then right over.”
“It’s from The Party,” he says.
“Is it from The Party?,” she says. “It is from The Party.”
“It’s from The Party,” he says. “I love it.”
Or is it from one of the Pink Panther films? It doesn’t matter: it’s from something funny, and Brosnan and Thompson are laughing like two of the world’s happiest Peter Sellers fans. They play a couple in the new caper comedy Love Punch, and their onscreen chemistry — a combination of middle-age sophistication and shameless slapstick — has spilled into a day of interviews.
Love Punch, which is showing at the Toronto International Film Festival, is about a divorced couple who discover their pensions are in danger because of some financial shenanigans by a bank. The only way to save the day is to get back together, head to the French Riviera, and steal a huge diamond that they can sell to recover the purloined funds. It’s a silly rom-com that relies on the screen appeal of its stars, which is considerable.
“Em and I have wanted to work together for a long time,” says Brosnan. “We didn’t actually say that to each other, but it was like, we should do something together.”
They were brought together by Joel Hopkins, a British director who had worked with Thompson on Last Chance Harvey, a 2008 film that also concerned middle-age issues (Thompson and Dustin Hoffman play a divorced couple attending their daughter’s wedding.)
Thompson, 54, said Hopkins spoke to both of them while he was writing Love Punch, making sure that the characters were a good fit. For instance, the film plays with the fact that Brosnan, 60, is a former James Bond, so he has talents that would come in handy for a middle-aged jewelry thief.
“It was wonderful to be able to play with that, to use that image that is so indelible in some respects and follows you around,” Brosnan says. “To put it into a suburban setting.” The actor has had a varied career in the 14 years since he last played 007 — everything from Mamma Mia! to Love Is All You Need — but as he puts it, “it’s there forever. In many respects it’s the gift that keeps giving. It allows you to go off and have a career that you wouldn’t necessarily have. So you always accentuate the positive. It’s a joy to do, and it’s still a joy to be associated with.”
Joy, or at least optimism, is part of what Love Punch is about.
“I don’t see many filmmakers out there wanting to make a film with that kind of feel,” says Thompson. “You could describe it as old-fashioned. But if it is old-fashioned, then we ought to bring it back into fashion. Because we don’t make movies now, very often, that are designed to make us feel happy.”
Thompson makes some of those films, from Sense and Sensibility (for which she won an Oscar for her screenplay) to the Nanny McPhee movies. It’s just that there aren’t that many of them.
“We used to make films that made you feel happy, and you knew that was why you were doing it. I did this movie because I wanted to make people feel happy. And in this day and age, I’m sorry to say, I think that’s quite a sort of revolutionary act.”
Thompson is a thoughtful woman, but she’s hard-pressed to come up with an answer as to why this is so.
“Sometimes I think it’s got a lot to do with the effect on our psyche of aspirational advertising, the news and the media. The fact that the more we watch, the more frightened we are. And we keep making movies that are very, very frightening. We seem to want to frighten ourselves.”
Brosnan — by now secure on his end of the couch — adds, “Shame each other.”
“Yes,” says Thompson. “Shame each other or feel that … we’re constantly asked this question: ‘Are you better than or less than?’ Every picture, every advert, every television program, everything, it’s all about ‘better than or less than.’
“Where are the things that we see around us that are produced by television executive or media executives that say, ‘We’re all the same. How do we enjoy ourselves? How do we make each other happy? How do we deal with our suffering? How do we deal with the agonies of being alive?’ We’re not asking those questions. We’re asking a very much simpler and brutalizing question: ‘Are you better than or are you less than?’”
Brosnan says, “It’s terrible agitation in society.”
Thompson says, “Terrible. Terrible. Misery.”
Brosnan says, “There’s no celebration of the human spirit. It’s few and far between. And a film like this, which is unabashedly simplistic in some ways and yet has a thread of the cultural heartbeat of the time, the downfall of the banks. But ultimately it’s a romp. It’s fantasy.”
Thompson says, “With such a merry, hopeful heart.”
They’re back into the spirit of things now, and Thompson has an easy explanation for why it works. “You’re dealing with Charisma, Inc., here, on my left,” she says. “And you’re playing with the clown in me. Because essentially I am a clown. That’s what I am. And always have been.”
Brosnan says, “And I’m just the straight man. It’s simple.”
Now they’re laughing again. Thompson assures him that he is so funny — very, very funny — but he hasn’t had much chance to show it on screen. She refers to a scene in Love Punch where he makes a comic face, a look that was unexpected and “very you.”
Brosnan says, “Well that was the joy of this piece, because it was just me. No acting required really. I came to it just playing myself, really. Show who you are. Follow the words, follow the direction, listen, don’t bump into the furniture, and try and keep it as simple as possible.”
By Jay Stone